THANATOPSIS

A mixed media show featuring 12 artists

The exhibition is bringing together work by several artists who make work about their existence by either personal narrative and documentation reacting to feelings, the physicality of the body, and representation of the self through symbolism and false narrative.

Wondering somewhere in between birth and death. Through collaborative staging and juxtapositioning of our work, we aim to bring our existence into question by reminiscence and reflection on the present, past and future.

This is our way of processing and understanding the slowly shifting and changing nature of our unstable reality and through this process we are learning more about ourselves. Our works are relics of now, materializing the ephemeral, presented before us to meditate on.

Open:

Wednesday 20 April: 1-6pm
Thursday 21 April: 12-6pm
Friday 22 April: 10-4pm

Private View:
Wednesday 20 April: 6-9pm

Performances:
Wednesday 20 April: 7.30pm
Friday 22 April: 2pm

organized by Yarden Fudim

Ana Carolina Ramos and Clara Uslu are an artistic duo who have a collaborative practice as well as an individual one. Ramos and Uslu come from a graphic design background, working with multiple mediums and exploring both digital and analogue processes, leaving room for chance and error in their process of creation.

Dien Berziga paintings are autobiographical, depicting personal memories and observations from everyday life regarding the artist and his surroundings. His works are like a diary, where he can share all his secrets. But they are not meant to be shared with the audience. Through the use of unconventional materials and mixed media that obscure the image Berziga keeps his inner world unintelligible and private.

Ola Kowalewska is a mixed media artist working between the boundaries of two-dimensional and three-dimensional artistic approaches and beyond, through a distinct visual language that considers the absent as much as what is present. The negative space and fragile connections between elements in Kowalewska’s work resemble the structure of the human body creating tension and anxiety. Kowalewska incorporates elements from archeological research, traditional crafts and slavic folk customs in the making of her work to capture the past in a perpetual present.

Rebecca Willing image making process is made up of an obsessive layering of marks formed by a controlled array of chance, impulse and elaboration. By following surrealist and constructivist conventions Willing creates familiar but strange dreamlike worlds that emerge from the layering and interplay of mark making, destruction and refinement of these preceding marks. Beginning from intuition, personal archive collections of found objects and photographs, fiction and poetry.

Renata Silvero follows an intuitive approach to performance. Silvero’s performances are like rituals; exploring the relationships between the artist’s body, the material/object, the space and the audience. The audience role isn’t passive, they bear witness to the performance and through occupying the space they involuntarily participate in it. Most of the materials used in the performances are organic, they rot and disintegrate, in flux. The ephemerality of Silvero’s actions evokes awareness of life and death.

Joana Azevedo Rodrigues is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the human form through an instinctive and sentimental process. She is preoccupied with the marginalization of sexuality and takes inspiration from personal experience of socialization of gender. In her practice she reduces and glorifies the human body but also celebrates it. Rodrigues is interested in how the audience is affected both physically and emotionally by her work, Utilizing readymade objects, considering a spectrum of forces, tension and destruction and manipulating sound.

Joanne Kim practice explores the encounter between the audience and the sensory experience provided by the work. Her creative process begins by revisiting past experiences and reconstructing and recreating them, through the use of a personal archive made up of video and sound recordings and photographs. She then Transfers and embeds these experiences in everyday objects, materials and surfaces. Kim is on a quest to evoke emotions that resonate with the audience memory supported by psychological research into olfactory perception, sound and sight.

Lucas Rankin Spiral networks blur and obstruct the sight through noise of texture. By utilizing automatic responses in writing and paintings and through sporadic encounters, Rankin transforms images, faces and landscape into new entities, stuck between the borderline of reality and fiction. Using historical and contemporary references, Rankin situates a network of unknowing, attempting to represent something punctuated and that can be seen differently from different perspectives.

Matilde Wall practice is focused on ceramics, performance, video and painting. Her work acts as a symbolic cry for freedom and as an invitation for a broader societal examination and a reflection on the gaze, judgement, objectification and categorization of the woman’s body. Through a symbolic use of the female vulva, strategies of displacement and Wall’s own body she invites a new type of gaze. Taking inspiration from artists like Carolee Shneeman and Julia Notari.

Yarden Fudim practice is discursive, working with a wide range of disciplines to accommodate it. Taking inspiration from her own personal experience and media outlets, Fudim is interested in making work that reflects current times and its breadth of happenings, morals, and values. Challenging the status quo and raising questions regarding society’s ways of living. Through the use of references from pop culture Fudim’s work invites anyone to be part of the conversation.

Zuzzana Murawiak works with materials of all kinds.The process of breathing life into inanimate things fascinates Murawick and resonates with her innate impulse to leave a mark and create something that can live beyond her. To Murawick the purpose of art is to materialize human experience, and her work is her thoughts materialized.